Come Away Come Sweet Love

John Dowland (1597) This lyric was set to music by the lutenist John Dowland in his enormously popular First Booke of Songs or Ayres in 1597 and was reprinted in the 1600 miscellany England's Helicon. As an aubade welcoming the advent of morning, the song departs from the melancholy tone that characterizes most of Dowland's early lute songs, instead bearing a sense of carpe diem: Each stanza opens with the refrain "Come away, come sweet love" and attempts to persuade the poet's beloved to seize the day and give in to his sexual advances.

The first stanza links love to the earth and air, portraying it as natural and joyful. The poet seeks to "mixe our soules in mutuall blisse" (1.7), referring somewhat flippantly to an ideal of Neoplatonism—sexual love as

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